Housing
Housing is the policy area where national decisions land most directly on daily life: whether a family can afford to rent, whether a young person can ever buy, whether a council can house those with nowhere to go. Successive governments have promised hundreds of thousands of new homes a year and none has delivered them since the 1960s. Planning rules, leasehold reform, renters’ rights, social housing and council tax all sit here, and the gap between what is pledged and what is built is one of the defining failures of modern British government.
The department responsible
In charge of planning, housebuilding, and the local councils that handle most of it. The 300,000 homes a year target has been agreed by every government since the war and met by none.
The Broken State
Public services performance
How the services this department runs are performing now, against a pre-pandemic baseline. 1 worsening.
MPs scrutinising this most
By written questions tabled to the department this Parliament.
1. Kevin Hollinrake Conservative1,5852. Rt Hon Sir James Cleverly Conservative1,2323. James McMurdock Independent5784. David Simmonds Conservative4265. Blake Stephenson Conservative321Bills and Acts
Investigations
The ten most expensive councils in England now charge a Band D bill of between £2,517 and £2,755 a year, every one of them well above the England average. Ranked, with an assessment of what residents get for the money.
Council tax has risen every year for over a decade, now £2,392 on average and as much as £2,765 a year. What has the increase actually bought?
Eight English councils have declared themselves effectively bankrupt since 2018. Between them they accumulated more than £5 billion in debt and deficit. One was abolished and replaced with two new authorities. Another went bankrupt three times in three years. A commuter-belt borough council with sixteen million pounds of annual revenue borrowed its way to £1.2 billion of debt, a ratio so extreme that no repayment schedule exists that could realistically clear it. England's second city is still under government commissioners who arrived in October 2023 and show no indication of leaving. And according to the Local Government Association's own survey, one in five council leaders expects to issue a Section 114 notice within two years.